There's No Smoke and Mirrors on HBO's Weed-Centric High Maintenance

As a Web series, High Maintenance was known for its unexpected twists. To viewers encountering the show for the first time when it debuts on HBO this Friday, the biggest surprise might be that High Maintenance is a show about a marijuana dealer, but not really about marijuana. At least, not primarily.

“The weed thing is such an afterthought for us,” explains co-creator Katja Blichfeld. Blichfeld and her collaborator Ben Sinclair, who plays the series’s central role, created the show not out of their love for cannabis so much as their love for each other. The husband-and-wife team co-wrote and co-directed the entire HBO season, and together they managed to make all 19 critically acclaimed High Maintenance webisodes—currently available on HBO streaming services—for less than $1,000 apiece.

And indeed, despite the illicit wares of the main character and its double entendre of a title, High Maintenance actually deals up vignettes: think less Friday and more Four Rooms; each episode endeavors to draw the viewer into the lives of New Yorkers living on top of each other, neighbors who may never exchange a passing glance. And the stories it tells are compelling, provocative, surprising, and intimate.

To achieve this, the auteurs approached every element of the production process with openness and creativity. Blichfeld, an Emmy-winning casting director, says that, unlike the Web series, they didn’t rely on actors to improvise for the TV version. But that strategy still played a part: “We definitely go in with a script, but we would be fools to not utilize people’s improv skills.” Die-hard fans of the Web series will be delighted at the return of beloved characters, including Heidi (Greta Lee), Hannibal (Hannibal Buress, playing pretty much himself), and Patrick (Michael Cyril Creighton), who gives one of the most moving performances of the series.

Sinclair and Blichfeld’s spirit of continual discovery carries over into post-production. “Sometimes in the editing process, we kind of go off script in a way and really move around the episode structurally,” Sinclair says. “The last draft of our script is usually the last edit.” Whatever the formula, the pair pulls off a dreamy and compelling narrative alchemy unlike anything else on television, which is what won the attention of the premier premium-cable powerhouse.

But before viewers decide to watch the show fully baked, they should probably be aware that they’re going to be reading a lot of subtitles. One remarkable achievement of the HBO season is the range of classes, national origins, household makeups, and relationship statuses visible in the stories that unfold. Two episodes depict immigrant families, and Blichfeld and Sinclair agree that authenticity in those cases requires a linguistic hybrid. “My parents are immigrants, and we speak a mix,” Blichfeld explains. “It always bothers us when we watch film and television where people are from another country and they exclusively speak English, always, and even with each other.”

Still, Blichfeld’s parents speak Danish, not Urdu or Korean. “In situations where we were portraying cultures that we didn’t have intimate familiarity with, we did ask our actors to help us fill out the authenticity,” Sinclair says.

Each stand-alone episode features the Guy, played by Sinclair, peddling his product to and near a fascinating slate of characters. But patterns and emotional connections emerge throughout the season, gradually rendering the whole picture more poignant. In Episode 4, a very green millennial journalist takes a break from her Instagram obsession just long enough to interview the Guy, asking him a few ham-fisted questions about his business on the record, then grilling him on his white privilege. Juxtapose her against the Pakistani-American college student in Episode 2 whose religious parents insist that she live with family rather than in the dorms, and it strikes a chord: they’re two parallel lives with little in common that nonetheless resound with similar tones of loneliness and isolation.

Sinclair seems somewhat apprehensive about whether the Guy comes across as “less friendly” in the HBO season. “We felt like he ended up being a little more guarded and a little more tired and worn out and, to be honest, stressed.” As a viewer, though, I feel relief every time the Guy makes an uptight choice. Watching his scenes, I was often preoccupied by my unanswered questions about his safety and the actual stakes of the risk he is taking. Being a weed delivery guy is like the worst possible combination of retail clerk, bike messenger, and enforcer. It’s a high-risk customer-service situation, trying to get clients to pony up—and you have no recourse when you’re ripped off.

While several episodes confront the Guy’s unique professional challenges head-on, both creators prefer to focus less on the pitfalls of drug dealing and more on the non-Guy characters and their stories. Rosenstein at HBO agrees. “People let their dealer know things about themselves that they might not even let their closest friends know,” says Rosenstein. “The weed is really the smallest part of the story.” It’s enough to make you wonder why they made the Guy a weed dealer at all instead of a Con Ed meter reader.

Or perhaps a bellhop, like the character that 1995’s Four Rooms revolves around. Coincidentally, 1995 was also the year that the unabashedly weed-centric Friday gave us “Bye, Felicia.” In *Friday’*s corner of South-Central L.A., the neighborhood drug delivery service is an ice-cream truck driven by Big Worm, an imposing and caustic dealer who ultimately sends four dudes with automatic weapons after his small-potatoes weed peddler Smokey (Chris Tucker) when he comes up short by $200.

And 1995 was also the year when a man in Texas named Roberto Antonio Davila was sent to prison for life for marijuana-related crimes, including conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute. President Barack Obama just commuted his sentence this past May. Davila is re-entering an American social landscape where marijuana-centered shows abound, and where at least one show predicated on dealing a Schedule I narcotic treats that element itself as secondary.

“I think we’d be liars if we said that when we started we didn’t want to, in some way, normalize weed smoking,” Blichfeld reveals. And while that may be a noble objective, it seems more likely that High Maintenance achieved its meteoric rise in part because weed smoking is already normalized, at least among premium-cable subscribers. Those of us who get to enjoy *High Maintenance’*s gorgeous human stories for six Fridays on HBO (or when they hit HBO Now, or with our ex’s HBO Go password) probably already live in situations where recreational amounts of marijuana are neither dangerous nor difficult to obtain, and we can choose to puff, or to pass, with relatively low stakes.

High Maintenance has no overt political agenda, but its creators are consciously raising meaningful questions. “We try to encapsulate the moment of the now whenever we release these episodes,” Sinclair explains, with respect to the issues of inequality and privilege that the show touches upon. “We don’t want to make anything in the world that’s going to not be useful.” The resulting work will take you on a meditative journey through the silly and the poignant, the touching and the surreal, one that ultimately leaves you feeling uplifted—if not exactly high.